What’s Actually Happening In The South China Sea? | View From Above | Business Insider

seen from miles above these rings in the ocean look like natural coral reefs but zoom in on highresolution satellite images and you can make out military bases with 10,000 ft runways ports and gun imp placements the South China Sea is bristling not just with artificial Islands but with egos Here China is facing off against the Philippines Vietnam and now the United States and as the Chinese bases and fleets keep growing and its opponents look to do the same this is a watery Battleground that looks ripe to ignite the chance of a small military incident that

then really puts the US and China into a cold war is very real to South Tennessee so will Island Building lead to conflict we spoke to the director of the Asian Maritime transparency initiative 1 2 3 4 and analyze shipping data and the rapidly changing View from Above to understand how close we might be the islands first started to appear just over 10 years ago the Philippines Vietnam and to a lesser extent Malaysia have since been engaged in a race to claim occupy and fortify outposts in the South China Sea but no one does it

on a scale quite like China it's not that people are outraged because China built Islands they're outraged because China built islands with the express purpose of kicking around its smaller neighbors so now there are Chinese planes overhead Chinese ships on the water 24 hours a day everywhere in the South Tennessee made possible only by all of that Island Building the superpower has 20 outposts in the parisel islands and seven in the spratley of these four are fully operational air and Naval bases they've got deep water harbors and all the the harbor works that would go

with them they've got Point defenses and anti-ship missiles and anti-air missiles to defend themselves these are fully functional and and I think people don't appreciate the scale we're talking about I mean subie Reef which is just 12 and a half miles from the nearest Philippine base is roughly the size of the Pearl Harbor Naval base of the US in Hawaii the Philippines occupies nine features in the spratley with just one air strip Vietnam has the most around 50 outposts spread across 27 locations in the South China Sea and Malaysia has five now with the region

bristling with ships Firepower and tension hey hey we clashes are inevitable in fact in fact they are happening all the time one particular hot spot is this patch of ocean around 100 miles from the coast of the Philippines back in the 1990s China occupied what was then an underwater feature called Mischief Reef over time China began to build permanent structures the Philippines panicked and they respond by going to the next closest Reef which happened to be second thas and intentionally grounding this useless old warship that they had no other better to do with onto the

reef as an emergency Outpost to keep an eye on Mischief Reef that was in 1999 but if you zoom in and look closely you can see that The Old Ship is still there today the Sierra Madre operates as a permanent military Outpost for the Philippines Marines rotate on and off while boats coming from the mainland resupply it with food and [Music] water meanwhile while Mischief Reef has been transformed Mischief reef is this giant ring around a lagoon most of Washington DC could fit inside of that Lagoon it's from here that China can launch missions to

intercept and intimidate Philippine vessels including those trying to resupply the Sierra Madre and so for the last two plus years the Philippines has had to run a blockade of China Coast Guard and Chinese militia vessels every time it wants to get through to these 8 to 10 Marines who live on this rusting Hulk and are completely reliant on outside food and pable water this video filmed by the Philippines military aboard the warship on June 17th 2024 shows vessels from the Chinese Coast Guard trying to stop Philippine resupply boats footage shows Chinese crew wielding axes and

knives these Maps show the movement of Chinese Coast Guard vessels between Mischief reef and second Thomas scha in recent years and this is the route of Chinese Coast Guard vessel 5205 in August 2024 on the 31st of August it was filmed ramming a Philippine ship close to the disputed Sabina sha east of second Thomas sha they've gone from just getting in the way and blaring the horn to using High Press water cannons to both injur Sailors and try to disable the engines they've used lasers to Blind crew they've used acoustic devices to try to deafen

them and on many occasions now they've begun to just Ram Philippine vessels trying to get through and the Philippines to its credit has not backed down in accordance with International and Philippine national laws we are proceeding according to our plan group the big question then is why is China doing this and what does it stand to gain it's partly about control control of one of the busiest shipping routes in the world of the South China Sea's valuable fish stocks and of the reserves of oil and gas Beneath the Sea bed all of that stuff is

true all of it's relevant but none of it is why Cen ping cares about the south chesee the Chinese Communist party has told itself a fairy tale that these things belong to China in times immemorial and therefore they must be recovered and we should not assume a hyper rational China any more than any other state is hyper rational any more than the fact the US and Canada still fight over the Gulf of Maine or that the Philippines still claims North Borneo or that the UK didn't give up Maritime claims to rockle Island until just a

few years ago like states do irrational things and China is no more rational than any other but no matter how irrationally China is acting in the South China Sea it's ultimately about geography and Logistics the spratley are 700 M from the Chinese ports on hyan having bases this far south gives China not only a physical foothold but a Launchpad for surveillance from the air and the Sea look closely again at Mischief Reef it took barely a year for Mis Reef to go from nothing to about 1,500 acres and then they graded and paved everything put

a 3,000 M air strip on it and all kinds of infrastructure to support Naval deployments Etc as well as sensing equipment housing offer quarter defensive Equipment China uses the runway for surveillance aircraft like kj2 200 and KJ 500 giving Beijing a permanent eye in the sky over the South China Sea China has eyes everywhere and it sees everything that all the other claimants and the outside parties like the US do for years the dispute has come down to who owns what who is entitled to what and this is where it gets messy although in the

eyes of of international law it should be fairly clearcut first there's the territorial sea that's the 12 nautical miles around any piece of land which a nation owns beyond that is the 200 nautical mile EZ or exclusive economic zone this is the area of ocean that stretches beyond the territorial sea and where the nation is free to exploit the natural resources and even build artificial Islands this map shows the competing E's for China the pH phines Vietnam and the other nations and in the middle of it all sits the paracels and the spratley and you

can see why they are so hotly contested what you can't do is build an artificial Island in someone else's e and then claim your own rights surround it this is what China has done with Mischief Reef but in 2016 an international tribunal ruled that China's claim over many features in in the South China Sea including land reclamation projects were unlawful noal and that should have been Case Closed legally the dispute is now over a few dozen tiny dots of territorial sea in the middle of the ocean and everything else should be pretty clear except that

China claims a whole another set of uh of entitlements China to famously draws this old dotted line map that originated in the 1930s and it says basically anything we can't find a way to claim under unclose inside that line we claim with historic rights the tribunal also dismissed China's so-called nine dash line claim but China rejects the Court's decision and continues to patrol water and claim reefs rocks and islands that lie within another nation's EZ Vietnam for one has not shied away from the fight in response to Chinese Island Building the Vietnamese began building small

outposts on reefs and sandb bars this map shows Vietnam's e the nation in fact claims all of the parisel islands and all of the spratley the outposts often start as small concrete structures like this one at Discovery great reef then from 2014 on we start to see walkways helipads and small docks with deeper Harbors cut into the reefs those are the darker areas you see here so all of that stuff was clearly meant to improve the resiliency of of Vietnam's bases in the face of this massive Chinese buildup and this new level of coercion we

saw under Sheen ping and then you've moved into a new phase of Island Building for Vietnam which started probably about the end of 21 but has accelerated over the last 18 months and that's been the expansion of islands overall where they've begun to mimic many of the tactics we saw from China including using the same kind of dredgers this is bark Canada Reef Vietnam occupied it in 1987 and for years only had a small Outpost this is what it looks like now barand Reef went from being basically zero acres of land to now the fourth

largest feature fourth largest island in the Sprat Le behind only China's big three if Vietnam wants to protect what it has and protect its rights in its own Waters it needs to be able to Patrol Those Waters in similar numbers to China and it can't do that if Chinese boats only have to go 10 miles and the Vietnamese boats have to go 300 miles that's just not math that'll ever work out for China it's all about the math and there's no doubt who's winning the numbers game over the course of the last 4 years China

went from having a virtually no Navy no Coast Guard and almost no fishing industry to having the world's second largest navy largest by number of ships second by tonnage to the US by far the world's largest Coast Guard the world's largest shipping industry the world's largest fishing industry the world's largest Marine science Industry right on and on and on and a unique component of this has become China's Maritime militia the militia of fishing boats are either fully operated or contracted by the Chinese government their job is to disrupt and block boats from other competing nations

in the South China Sea or simply sit idle maintaining a highly visible Chinese presence to see this like new thing emerged in the South chin sea where Filipino and Vietnamese patrols would go out and they'd find hundreds of Chinese boats sitting in Anchor tied up to each other often uncrewed or crewed by a skeleton crew just sitting around playing car and watching their phones and not doing anything these are the movements of Chinese vessels identified by Asia Maritime transparency initiative as militia vessels on the same month from 2021 to 2024 with all the heightened tension

above the water an ecological disaster has been unfolding beneath the waves to build these islands Engineers started by using clamshell dredges scooping sand and coral into barges and then dumping it in a pile to create Islands nowadays the likes of China and Vietnam are using methods that are even more destructive suction dding the drill bit grinds up everything indiscriminately Rock Coral marine life sand and then it shoots this you know organic slurry out the other end that's what China built its Islands using and that's why it didn't just kill the reef that was covered in

in sand it killed all the reef nearby too it dug up all the coral to make that sand and then it put huge plumes of sediment into the water that drifted around and smothered anything that had managed to escape the initial digging as the islands and the Rival navies expand so does the chance that skirmishes turn to battles the US has a mutual defense treaty with the Philippines and has promised to come to the aid of its old Ally in the event of an attack on its military or its Coast Guard recent meetings between Joe

Biden and his Philipp counterpart Ferdinand Marcos Jr serve as a warning shot to China specifically with regard to the South China Sea it's a numbers game you hit people with enough water cannons you ram their boats eventually you are going to kill somebody but what Greg polling in the Asia Maritime transparency initiative have noticed is not that the tides have turned but that there seems to be a greater willingness to stand up to China the Philippines has begun to rep patrol around scar BR sha for the first time since CH to took it from them

in 2012 and it's been not only resupplying but building up you know Shoring up the sh modate despite the Chinese blockades China has at least so far been unwilling to use over military force and I think the southeast Asians have realized that China can't have it both ways you know if they just drive straight if they ignore all the harassment if they're firm and committed to this they've been able to develop new resources resupply people Patrol where they want and all China's Behavior has done really is internationalize the disputes and create exactly the kind of

anti-china Coalition that Beijing has always feared more than anything else your actions have threaten China's sovereignty security and related rights and interests to avoid miscalculations leave and keep a far off immediately over we are proceeding according to our plan route request to stay clear from our passage in accordance with the Collision regulation over